Tuesday, 23 September 2014

The Photographers’ Gallery in London is currently holding an exhibition
on early colour photography in Russia (Primrose
apparently translates as ‘first colour’ in Russian). The introductory
blurb states that it is simultaneously an examination of the history of Russia
in photographs and the history of Russian photography. It’s a neat
formulation, but as colour has been a small element of Russian photography for
most of the discipline’s history, neither one is an achievable goal within the exhibition’
compass. Certainly if you were to rely on it for an education in Russian
history you would come away with only a partial understanding, but then it is
hardly likely anyone would want to do so. After all, a mere hundred and
forty photographs cannot do justice to the subject, and the exhibition does
feel a little sketchy when considered as a whole. Even so, one can trace
the technological changes in photography alongside an outline of developments
in Russian society during a tumultuous century.

Notwithstanding reservations about the exhibition’s lofty goals, the
photographs included are well worth a look. Eschewing fancy thematic
groupings beloved of curators, the photographs are hung chronologically on two
floors, one devoted to the Czarist period, the other to post-Revolution
photography. The earliest images date from the 1860s, and show a mixture
of studio portraits and landscapes, with hand-colouring often producing
beautiful results. Then come photographs that were a more accurate
representation of the scene photographed, including Sergei
Prokudin-Gorsky’s three-plate additive technique and reproductions of some
lovely autochromes.

Varvara Stepanova - Be ready!, 1932

After the October Revolution there were the familiar photomontages used
as propaganda by the Soviet government, and the inclusion of works by Aleksandr Rodchenko and Varvara Stepanova
hint at a paucity of colour photography at that time. With a more
rigid orthodoxy under Stalin, photography was controlled by state monopoly,
private studios banned, and limited supplies of colour stock were used by
approved photographers in adherence to Socialist Realist tenets (cue heroic
peasants and workers and the odd collective farm, and lots of carefully
composed – and stilted – compositions).

Yakov Khalip - Sea cadets, late 1940s

Under Khrushchev’s reforms photography started to permeate society and
was used less formally to document social conditions, though it is clear that
there were still strict boundaries as to what was permissible in the early
years. Russia only began producing colour film in quantity itself in in
the 1950s, and film became widely available to the public in the 1960s (another significant development was home processing of colour
transparencies, which as well as reducing costs lessened the risk of official
disapproval).

With the increasing availability, state control became more difficult.

Ivan Shagin - Student, early 1950s

The final part of the exhibition is a
slideshow of Suzi et Ceteraby Boris Mikhailov, which explores the drabness of a society that had failed
to fulfil its promise. The photographs are direct and uncompromising in their
subversion of the idealised image of everyday life that had been the Communist
norm, and an enormous contrast to the sedateness of the rest of the exhibition.
Some of them are explicit, and it is amusing that the slideshow is put in a
little corner area so that the interested can see it without the rest being
offended. Sitting there feels a slightly clandestine activity, which in a
way replicates the original viewing conditions when the slides were presented
privately to small artists’ groups.

I was puzzled by the exhibition’s title on two counts (leaving aside the
relevance of the primrose): firstly there are landscapes that were taken in
Kiev, and Mikhailov lives and works in Ukraine, so the exhibition is not
completely 'Russian'; secondly, going up to the 1970s somewhat stretches the
definition of 'early'. Still, it is enjoyable in a number of ways.
The pre-revolutionary photographs are poignant, showing landscapes and people
in a diverse country before it embarked on its astonishing
transformation. The inter-war years show initial optimism, but also
increasing regimentation. The post-second world war photographs open a
window onto a world that was hidden for so long from the West and made to feel
completely alien because of the Cold War. The current political situation
in Russia feels like a backward step, and the post-Soviet artistic
experimentation may eventually take on its own nostalgic glow in a society that
once again subordinates freedom of expression to ideological control.

Dmitri Baltermants - Rain, 1960

The gallery staff could take a look at how they produce the captions
stencilled on the walls. Letters come away easily, making some words
difficult to read, and it would help if they were applied in a way that rendered
them less vulnerable to damage. I don’t want to carp though, because the
exhibition shows what can be done on a limited budget, and the curator and
gallery staff are to be congratulated on a fine display. Anyone with an interest in colour
photography and/or in Russian history would be well rewarded by a visit.

Primrose: Early
Colour Photography in Russia is at the Photographers’ Gallery,
London until 19 October 2014. It is curated by Olga Sviblova, director of
the Moscow House of Photography Museum and ‘Multimedia Art Museum’ and is part
of the ‘UK-Russia Year of Culture 2014’ (probably not an auspicious year to
hold such an event, which is a shame).

Monday, 15 September 2014

[This is an
adapted version of an assignment written for a course on the nineteenth-century
novel]

In his essay ‘The
Art of Fiction’, Walter Besant (2001 [1884]) argues that the novel is a fine art,
on the same technical level as other arts such as poetry, music, painting and
sculpture, though in some respects superior in that its subject matter is the
whole of humanity. He argues that the
novel instils in the reader empathy for others, and is therefore a civilising
force. As part of his argument, Besant sets
up a criterion of artistic quality for the novel based on its moral
orientation: the novel ‘almost always’ begins with a moral purpose, to the
extent that this could be characterised as ‘practically a law of English
fiction’ (2001, p.67).

It follows that
where a novel does not begin with a moral purpose, it conveys a sense of
‘debasement’ to the reader, in which case the author cannot be considered an
artist. However, Besant discounts didacticism,
in the form of the old-fashioned ‘preaching novel’ propagandising on behalf of
a theological perspective. As well as
the moral imperative, the novel can also be characterised in terms of
craftsmanship: poor style distracts from the artistic effect, but this has to
be balanced so that style does not predominate to the detriment of the
fictional world, style being subject to transitory fashions. An understanding of these laws, as Besant
considered them, would improve the quality of many of the inferior novels that
were so common.

Besant’s talk
sparked a debate on the function of the novel, with a number of contributions. Foremost among these was Henry James’s article
with the same title (2001b [1884]). He
does not see the novel having a moral purpose, and considers Besant’s recipe
for the novel as an artistic product to be prescriptive. James argues that the novelist is free to
approach the task with complete freedom, the only obligation being that the
novel should be ‘interesting’ and ‘a personal impression of life’ (2001b, p73);
it is only the execution that should be subject to criticism (2001, p.78).

Delia Da Sousa Correa
interprets this as James claiming that he saw no place for moral aspects in fiction
(2001, p142). However, James was not arguing
for unengaged aestheticism: Amanda Claybaugh notes that the two novels James
wrote after this essay – The Bostonians
and Princess Casamassima – dealt with
social reform, thus having a moral dimension (2006, p.139). But Correa also notes that James’s emphasis
on creativity and imagination challenges both simplistic notions of reflective
realism and the novel as vehicle for moral values (2001, p.141).

Other writers
had views on the moral aspect of the novel.
Robert Louis Stevenson (2001 [1884], pp.93ff) argues that art cannot
compete with life and is only a pale imitation of it, supplying ‘phantom
reproductions of experience’ (2001, p96).
It extracts details from the broad sweep of life and makes something
‘typical’ of them. He therefore sees the
novel as more of an entertainment than having a higher purpose. Émile
Zola on the other hand finds a moral purpose in Naturalism, as Naturalists are ‘experimental
moralists’, showing ‘the mechanism of the useful and the useless’ for the
social good (Zola, 1893, p.31).

According to
James Eli Adams, Henry James credited Besant’s essay as the beginning of
criticism of the Victorian novel (2012, p.62).
However, Adams points out that this discounted previous critical debate
on the status of the novel, though much of the debate took place within reviews
(2012, p.62); George Eliot’s review ‘The Natural History of German Life’ is a case
in point (2001 [1856]); Claybaugh points out that Besant emphasises the novel’s
‘conscious moral purpose’ ‘in much the same terms as George Eliot did thirty
years before’ (2006, p.138). Eliot sees
her treatment of her characters in Middlemarch
(1994 [1872]), as involving issues of morality and fair dealing. These may be summed up by the term ‘social
sympathies’ that she uses in her 1856 review (2001, p.30). Without psychological depth, she argues, the
result is unrealistic, and lacks moral force.

James’s review
of Middlemarch (2001a [1873]) reaches
the paradoxical verdict that it is ‘at once one of the strongest and one of the
weakest of English novels,’ referring to the choice between a balanced whole
and ‘a mere chain of episodes’. He
concludes that it is ‘a treasure-house of details’ but ‘an indifferent whole’
(2001a, p.79). Eliot would surely have
considered that perceived weakness to be its strength. Middlemarch
is socially integrated, a web of mutual influences and balances, as indicated
by Eliot’s repeated use of the web metaphor.
Thus ‘Lydgate fell to spinning that web from his inward self … As for
Rosamond ... she too was spinning industriously at the mutual web’ (p346). The web is typical of Eliot’s ambiguous
approach to mutual influence, which can convey influence and sympathy yet also
be seen as a means of entrapment. The
latter is invariably due to personal weakness, and it is through social
interaction that character is expressed, and can change. Lydgate is disdainful of provincial life,
‘his conceit was of the arrogant sort’ (p149), but he thereby shows himself to
be one whose ‘distinguished mind is a little spotted with commonness’ (p.150).

Of all the
characters’ in the book’s wide canvas, the one who most embodies a sense of
moral purpose is Dorothea, explicitly linked to St Theresa, but living at a
time when there is no practical scope for such a figure. In terms of a moral purpose, Dorothea is
shown to have limited effect, her aspirations generally ‘intangible and
abstract’, her ‘apparently unlimited potential for greatness’ (Nora Tomlinson 2001a,
p.246) limited by her situation. As a
counterpoint to Dorothea, Rosamond is shown to be aesthetically pleasing but
lacking her sister’s moral fibre. Eliot
attaches the word ‘heroine’ to Rosamond as an ironic label, as she possesses ‘a
great sense of being a romantic heroine, and playing the part prettily’ (p.297)
but significantly also uses it when describing the other woman in Lydgate’s
life, Laure, who stabbed her husband.
Neither matches up to the heroic and selfless aspirations of Dorothea
who, with Caleb Garth, forms a moral compass for the rest of the cast. At the same time Dorothea’s social
inexperience leads her to misjudge Casaubon’s merits and motives (as Lydgate
misjudges Rosamond’s in a different way).

A linking
element to the moral dimension of the characters is the world of work as
fulfilling both personally and for society.
Garth in particular sees work in moral terms, exemplifying Smilesian notions
of application and perseverance, with ‘Business’ as the highest calling,
irrespective of its rewards or risks.
Yet despite his apparent indifference he is rewarded, while Fred Vincy
is redeemed by his association with Mary Garth and her father. However, the hypocritical Bulstrode, who
gained his wealth by dubious means, has to endure opprobrium, the financially
imprudent and weak Lydgate faces ruin when his focus shifts from his medical
vocation to accommodating Rosamond’s extravagance, and the blackmailing Raffles
meets an unfortunate end. Ladislaw,
initially a dilettante, buckles down and eventually achieves political office, contrasting
with Mr. Brookes who, content to allow his tenants to live in poverty, is
unsuccessful in his parliamentary ambitions.
Middlemarch’s characters tend
to achieve deserts consonant with their virtues; apart ironically from the kindly
cleric Mr. Farebrother, who fails to win Mary’s hand (though he does have
professional success). In all these
strands Eliot ‘sought to explore the natural laws that determined human behaviour’
(Tomlinson, 2001b, p.272), characters inhabiting a world influenced profoundly
by the 1859 publication of Charles Darwin’s On
the Origin of Species.

Eliot and Besant
were not so far apart in their attitudes to the novel’s moral character. The major distinction between them was their
respective attitudes to the role of religion in formulating morals. Besant had emphasised ‘deep-seated religion’
as a force for the author that will ‘lend to his work, whether he will or not,
a moral purpose’ (Besant, 2000, p.67).
This was in contrast to Eliot’s secularism: ‘George Eliot, at least, had
discarded the primary religious and epistemological assumptions of her
inherited culture, including the convention that a single unitary theory of
reality could be established’ (George Levine, 2008, p.32). Not only did Eliot diverge from Besant’s emphasis
on religion as an essential component of a moral outlook, but she understood
that this had implications for the treatment of her characters. Without a religious underpinning, her
criterion for determining the value of actions had to be a humanist one that
gauged moral value solely in terms of an action’s effect on others. In contradistinction to James, Eliot and Besant
each emphasised the novel’s moral purpose, but from entirely different
perspectives.

References

Adams, J. E.
(2012) ‘A History of Criticism of the Victorian Novel’, in David, D (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to the Victorian
Novel, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

Monday, 8 September 2014

[This
is an adapted version of an assignment written for a course on the
nineteenth-century novel]

Genre
can be broadly characterised as a means of categorising stylistic similarities which
manage readers’ expectations within and between texts (see M. H. Abrams, 1999,
p.108). Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre combines and modulates a
number of genres, but generic elements are subtly interwoven so that rarely
does one predominate over others for long, nor do they at any time descend to
pastiche. Even in the case of the
novel’s Gothic aspect, the most obvious of its generic borrowings, these are more
realistic than they might be in such obvious examples as The Mysteries of Udolpho (Ann Radcliffe, 1966 [1794]). Instead genres play against each other,
reinforcing and undermining reader expectations and enriching the characterisation
of Jane.

Delia
da Sousa Correa (2000, p.97ff) outlines the variety of ‘high’ and ‘low’ genres
present in the novel and explores their interplay. She notes that Jane Eyre is variously Bildungsroman,
a ‘novel of education’ and development; fictional autobiography; realist social
commentary; romance; governess novel; plea for equality (though in a more
restrained mode than the tradition of Mary Wollstonecraft); even at points a
novel of religious and ethical debate, in addition to those elements that are
Gothic and melodramatic. As Correa
points out, the admixture of genres suggests ‘multiple potential developments
for Jane’s story’ (Correa, 2000, p.98). When
we set off with Jane on her journey we cannot be sure what direction it will
take, leaving her character development less constrained than it would be if
the novel were confined to a single narrative style, with its attendant set of
expectations. These generic devices are
one means whereby Brontë generates, as Michael Mason discusses in another
context, an ‘unconscious response, on our part, to powerful cues’ (Mason, 1996,
p.xxii)

The
Gothic tropes are easily noted, but there are other aspects which work to show
the complexities of Jane and her situation, reinforcing its strangeness. A more subtle contribution than the Gothic
elements is made by the consistent use of fairy story features to underpin
Jane’s trajectory. The central example
is the association of Jane with elves, fairies and spirits of the earth
(variations on the word ‘green’ recur frequently throughout the novel). This strand links Jane and Rochester from
their first meeting, when Rochester falls from his horse upon coming across
Jane sitting on a stile moments after Jane, hearing his horse in the distance,
was put in mind of stories of the ‘Gytrash’, ‘a North-of-England spirit’ (Brontë,
1996, p.128). Gilbert and Gubar characterise
this encounter as “a fairytale meeting” (Gilbert and Gubar, 1979, p.351). Recalling it, Rochester casts the memory into
fantasy terms, jocularly claiming, after suggesting that he had considered
asking if Jane had ‘bewitched’ his horse, that he had thought that Jane was
‘waiting for your people when you sat on that stile’ (p.139). In response to the question ‘For whom, sir?’
he continues: ‘For the men in green’, (ibid.) thus explicitly linking her with fairy
folk, and implicitly accusing her of the ability to bewitch him. In true folkloric fashion she finds herself in
a place of enchantment, Thornfield, though in a reversal of Rochester’s teasing
claims she discovers that he has bewitched her.
Rochester usually uses such language patronisingly,
and its repetition invests Jane subliminally with a feyness that counterpoints
the more typical emphasis in the book on her down-to-earth practicality and
common sense, enriching her character.

The
stile, that staple of country furniture hitherto associated with Jane, later
becomes associated with Rochester himself.
Upon her return from Gateshead after the death of Mrs Reed, Jane
encounters him sitting on a stile, writing.
Yet unlike with Jane, this does not confer an ethereal quality on him,
the association with the fairy folk thus being cast in gendered terms. Upon seeing her, and learning that her aunt
is dead, he notes that she has not come by carriage ‘like a common mortal’, but
arrived ‘just as if you were a dream or a shade’ ( p.275). He then connects her explicitly with death
and the Afterlife: ‘She comes from the other world – from the abode of people
who are dead … If I dared, I’d touch you, to see if you are substance or
shadow, you elf!’ (ibid.) A couple of
weeks later he describes the encounter to Adèle, referring initially obliquely
to Jane as the other participant: ‘It was a fairy, and come from Elf-land,’ and
then he says that ‘Mademoiselle is a fairy’ ( p.300). Adèle dismisses his
‘Contes de fée’ [fairy stories] as the product of ‘un vrai menteur’ [a true
liar], herself speaking truer than she realises. It is ironic that as a child Jane had
dismissed the existence of elves as less plausible even than Gulliver’s Travels: ‘as to the elves,
having sought them in vain … I had at length made up my mind to the sad truth
that they were all gone out of England to some savage country…’ (p.28). It is she who is herself now identified with
them by Rochester.

A
witchcraft/sorcery motif also links Rochester and Jane. When Jane saves Rochester from a fiery death
in bed by throwing water, Rochester in his confusion asks, ‘In the name of all
the elves in Christendom, is that Jane Eyre? … What have you done with me,
witch, sorceress?’ (p.169) This is not
said in his usual jocular fashion, making it an honest indicator of Rochester’s
sense of her power over him. But similar
vocabulary is used of Rochester. When he
masquerades as a gypsy woman he is described as a ‘real sorceress’ by Frederick
Lynn (p.217), while Miss Ingram refuses to believe that he is a ‘genuine witch’
(p.219) and Jane snorts that his ‘witch’s skill is rather at fault sometimes’ (p.225). Bertha is also woven into this set of witch
references: when Jane returns to Thornfield after the fire and enquires what
had happened, she is told that the fire was set by Bertha, ‘who was as cunning
as a witch’ (p.475), cunning in a way that Jane is not; Bertha’s is a different
type of witchcraft entirely, one with disastrous consequences. Jane, Rochester and Bertha are linked in a
chain which can be broken only by Bertha’s death.

In
the meantime, if Jane is identified with fairies and elves, and both she and
Rochester with witches and sorcerers, Rochester is associated metaphorically
with a much darker fairytale motif, that of Bluebeard (see Snodgrass, 2005,
pp.33-34, for the history and influence of Charles Perrault’s ‘La Barbe Bleu’). John Sutherland examines parallels between ‘Bluebeard’
and Jane Eyre, noting that by the
1840s the former ‘would have been among the best-known of fables (Sutherland,
2000, p.68). When Mrs Fairfax is showing
her over Thornfield, Jane finds herself in the corridor in which Bertha is imprisoned It is ‘narrow, low, and dim … like a corridor
in some Bluebeard’s castle’ (p.122), though at this point she does not realise
the implication of her musings. This
melodramatic aura evokes a sense of mystery within Rochester’s home which
increases in intensity, culminating in Bertha’s visit to Jane’s room (pp.316-8).

The
misogynistic Bluebeard association might be thought to convey a sense of
Rochester as a threat to Jane, yet because of the overriding romance genre
expectations we do not read him in this way.
Bluebeard’s actions contain a degree of sadism, whereas Rochester’s act in
confining his wife, it is implied, was humane, undermining the sense that Rochester
is being self-serving by keeping her secret and is subjecting her to an
injustice by her incarceration. It may
be, as Sutherland observes, that Brontë inverts the conclusion so that we feel
sympathy, Rochester as ‘a Bluebeard who has wholly mended his ways’ (Sutherland,
2000, p.69), with little remembrance by the reader that his treatment of Bertha
deserves censure. Added to the implied
sympathy for what he has endured through Bertha’s insanity and the sense that
he married her under false pretenses, Brontë glosses over Rochester’s
responsibility for injustice against Bertha and Jane by removing him from the
narrative after his failed attempt at bigamy and only showing him again at his
lowest ebb. This structure of silence allows
Jane to return to him, despite his past misdeeds and confessed sexual
incontinence, yet still retain the reader’s approbation for her act, while for
Rochester the slate is wiped clean with Bertha’s death and his penitential disabilities.

Related
to the Gothic and fairy elements that work alongside the realism to deepen it is
the uncanny, evoking an eerie, strange quality that does not necessarily
conform to what we normally understand as natural laws (Correa, 2000, p.109). It has a psychological aspect, involving such
elements as clairvoyant visions and precognition. Sometimes apparent paranormality is shown to
be explainable, as when Jane becomes panicky while locked in the red room, or when
Rochester makes his gypsy pronouncements.
Often, however, explanations are not so straightforward. Jane refers to ‘Sympathies’ expressed at a
distance ‘whose workings baffle mortal comprehension,’ suggesting a belief in
the operation of the ‘higher phenomena’ of mesmerism, such as clairvoyance (p.248).

The
most famous example of the uncanny is what Sutherland refers to as ‘Rochester’s
celestial telegram’ (Sutherland, 1996, p.59), which occurs when Jane is being
worn down by St. John’s persuasions to become his wife. Suddenly she experiences a sharp feeling and
hears a voice call her name three times, to which she replies:‘”I am coming!”
I cried. “Wait for me! Oh, I will come!”’
She then twice asks: ‘“Where are
you?”’ (p.467). This could be a
subjective hallucination, but it later transpires that Rochester in his despair
had called her name thrice at the same time that Jane had heard it, and
received a reply: ‘“I am coming: wait
for me”; and a moment after … the words – “Where are you?”’ (p.496). This veridical
telepathic communication denotes a bond operating at a time of high emotion,
one that saves Jane from marrying St. John and reunites her with her true love
(Mason, 1996, p.xxix). Sutherland notes
that for Brontë this was not supernatural because she was convinced that such
events had happened (Sutherland, 1996, p.60), and he suggests that Jane and
Rochester had each self-induced a trance (with a candle and the moon
respectively) at the same time. As with the novel’s fairy elements, such
uncanny themes in the novel imply that there is a deeper meaning to reality
than we see every day, one that links us both to kindred spirits and to unseen
forces in the world.

Overview

Over the last few years I have written a large number of pieces, mainly reviews on aspects of the paranormal and of visual culture, but many are no longer available. This blog format is a convenient way of putting my bibliography online and adding some of the old items, plus the occasional new one.

A Note on Titles of Publications

The British and Irish Skeptic is now The Skeptic

The Newsletter of the Society for Psychical Research became The Psi Researcher and then The Paranormal Review

Many of the later items are available online, notably those written for nthposition and the SPR website. Those for The Psi Researcher, Paranormal Review and SPR Journal are available in the SPR's online library; see http://www.spr.ac.uk/ for details.